Writing That Heals: Why Horror is the Most Honest Genre with Lee Murray

Bram Stoker Award winning author on honesty and finding her way

Thanks to Angela Yuriko Smith for the intro!

Standout Authors Unbound amplifies the voices of underrepresented writers and indie authors to disrupt an industry that rewards conformity over authenticity.

What if the genre you dismissed as too dark was actually the most honest thing you could read?

Lee Murray has spent twenty years writing horror from the edge of the world. She’s won five Bram Stoker Awards, a New Zealand Prime Minister Award for Literary Achievement, and a medal from the King.

And she’ll be the first to tell you she’s barely making grocery money. That gap between recognition and reward is just one of the things Lee is refreshingly honest about in this conversation.

She also talks about what it really means to put yourself in a story, why horror is one of the most grown-up genres out there, and how building community from the bottom of the world changed everything for her.

Highlights

“Write what you know” means something deeper than you think.

Most writers hear that phrase and think about surface-level experience. When she was starting out, Lee did too.

She wrote about marathon running because she had run 25 of them. She knew the material. But something was still missing.

It wasn’t until she started writing from her identity as an Asian woman in a Western country, about her experience with depression and anxiety, and the tension between cultures she carries every day, that her writing found its real power.

“What I think they mean when they say put yourself in this story is you need to write the story that only you can write. You need to write the things that resonate for you, that make you frightened, that make you feel something. You need to put those things into the story.”

That kind of vulnerability is harder than craft. And it takes longer to find. But when you do, readers feel it.

Horror is the most grown-up genre in the room.

There is a particular kind of prejudice that follows horror writers around.

People assume it’s B-grade, gratuitous, not serious literature.

Lee pushes back on that because horror is where we go to face the things we can’t say out loud: losing control, shame, the unknown. All the parts of the human experience that we aren’t supposed to talk about.

“Fear is the most primal feeling. What frightens us, what worries us, what gives us the chills — exploring that is a universal thing because we all are afraid of something. And it drives our behavior.”

Monsters, she explains, are almost always metaphors. For trauma. For oppression. For the generational weight we carry without even realizing it. Horror allows us to hold those things up and examine them.

Everyone has their own process.

Lee describes herself as a slow writer. She does not do vomit drafts. She can’t turn off her editor brain long enough to just get words on the page.

For a long time, that felt like a flaw but now she sees it differently.

“I tend to kind of have an idea, kind of know where it’s going, and then I kind of write it... I’ll write a sentence and I’ll go back and revise the sentence and then I’ll write the next sentence. That makes me a slow writer. But at the end of the day, I tend to find that I don’t change too much.”

She has no stories on the backburner. Nothing is abandoned. Everything she has written has found its place.

Find the gap that only you can fill.

Lee did not set out to create a niche. She just started writing the stories she wanted to read and could not find anywhere else: horror thrillers set in the New Zealand bush, feminist Asian horror, stories about mental illness.

“Sometimes it’s a good idea to look for the gap. Where is the gap that you can fill that only you can tell that story? Your story.”

And once she found that space, she did something most people won’t do — she invited others in. She believes you don’t need to protect your niche because there’s more than enough room for everyone.

When you bring more writers into the space you helped create, the whole genre grows.

Survive and thrive through community.

Publishing from New Zealand is difficult because the industry mostly looks the other way. Traditional publishers are largely absent and literary agents are almost nonexistent. Shipping a $12 book to New Zealand costs $35.

And yet Lee has built something that spans the globe and she did it by showing up.

Through anthologies that built readerships around shared ideas. Through mentorship that she gives and receives. And through joining every writing group she believes in.

“If you want something to happen, you need to step up and do it.”

That lesson came from her parents, who ran school committees and sports clubs because they wanted to see those things exist. Lee brought the same energy to horror. And horror gave her a tribe in return.

Success means something different for everyone.

Lee is not a millionaire bestseller, but she also doesn’t aim to be one.

Instead she has a community she loves, a genre she is proud of, and a body of work that has earned some of the highest honors in the field.

“Once you’ve defined what is successful to you, what would successful look like, then you can step forward and say, how am I going to get there?”

That question is worth asking because the answer changes everything. The path to a bestselling series looks nothing like the path to a life built around craft, community, and meaning. There is no “right” path, only the path you choose to take.

Closing Reflection

Lee Murray reminds us that horror is not a guilty pleasure. It is literature doing serious work in a world that needs it.

Her journey shows what happens when a writer stops acting the part and starts putting the real, complicated, vulnerable parts of themselves on the page.

If you are an author who writes stories that feel too personal, too niche, or too strange for the mainstream, we want to hear from you.

Leave a comment and tell us about your work. You deserve the spotlight too.